FM 7 on OS X in Classic Mode

Problem

"Adobe has announced no plans to release FrameMaker 7.1 on the Mac OS
X platform," the company said in a statement. Adobe said it will continue
to sell and support Version 7.0 on the Mac for OS 9 and Classic.

Don't be put off by this announcement (and Adobe's thin answers to insisting
questions).
«A petition with 2500 signatures, for a software product that costs
about $700 new, represents $1.75 million. Even if half of them were upgrading
and paying only 1/2 the fees, it is still well over $1M. Seems like it is
worth a recompile and some packaging... »[ hoco, tribe.net]

Some user feedback

Keyboard setup

I have manged the problem with the keyboard (Hello Bernd, which problem?).
The keyboard assignment must be changed for the OS9 mode: Apple Menu
> Control Panels > Keyboard.

Creating PDF

You can not Save as PDF in Classic Mode. However, you can
create a PostScript file and then distill it to a PDF.

Assure that also in the Classic environment the printer named FrameMakerPDFWriter
is available. If not then Acrobat was installed correctly or with the apropriate
options.

Check the System folder > System Extensions to find the
printer description files FMPdfWriter and FMPdfWriterData.

[Bernd Meißner]

Additional information from the FM 7 ReadMe file

FrameMaker installs a custom desktop printer called FrameMakerPDFWriter.
This desktop printer is used by the Save As PDF functionality in FrameMaker
to automate PDF creation. To activate this desktop printer after installation
of FrameMaker, you may need to open Chooser, select the AdobePS icon, then
close Chooser. You may then reopen Chooser if you wish to re-select your previous
printer driver.

Selecting AdobePS will create two additional desktop printers- "Create
Adobe PDF" and "Virtual Printer". Create Adobe PDF can be used
to create PDF files from any application by selecting it in Page Setup or
Print and printing directly to it. Virtual Printer is similarly used to create
PostScript files. You should NOT use FrameMakerPDFWriter separately to create
PDF files through the Print dialog - it is customized for internal FrameMaker
use and may not give the appropriate results if used as a general desktop
printer.

FrameMakerPDFWriter functionality can be sporadic on MacOS-X,
such that the PDF item in the Save As dialog is grayed-out when running in
Classic mode under OS-X. Instead, please print to the Create Adobe PDF desktop
printer on MacOS-X to create PDF files.

Additional information

See this valuable information from Paul Findon on his www.fm4osx.org (saved
in this PDF)

A clarification

First off, Sam, your initial assertion of 'Tiger does NOT support OS 9 in
any form' is misleading (forgive my bluntness): it's not a Tiger (i.e. OS)
restriction, but a hardware restriction. All versions of OS X have supported
OS 9 in its Classic form, a software wrapper that allows a full OS 9 to run
within the OS X environment. And within that, FrameMaker runs just fine,
as long as you follow the guidelines
given here

What is true is that none of the most recent range of Intel-chipped Macs
run Classic. This is hardware issue: Apple chose not to port Classic to these
machines. This is a situation that a lot of clever people are working on,
as Apple appears to be unaware that many Mac users are still dependent on
legacy software. But for FrameMaker, the option at present on these machines
is to run one of the software solutions that support Windows or Windows apps:

Finally, Peter Gold's point about dual-boot Macs only applies to older
hardware models. I forget when the last dual-boot Mac was dropped, but you
should be able to find
out here. For what it's worth, I have a 2000-vintage Cube that is dual
boot, and a 2004-vintage G4 that is not, so it was sometime between those
years.